1859 - 1930
Young Turk leader and educator.
Born in Istanbul to an Austrian mother and to a father who was an Anglophile Ottoman bureaucrat, Ahmet Riza grew up among the wealthy elite. He attended the prestigious Galatasaray Lycée in Istanbul and studied agriculture in France. As an idealistic young man, he sought to improve the condition of the Ottoman peasantry, first at the Ministry of Agriculture, then at the Ministry of Education, where he served as the director of education in the city of Bursa.
At the age of thirty, Ahmet Riza returned to France, where he became an early leader of the Young Turks. In 1894 he published a series of tracts demanding a constitutional regime in the Ottoman Empire based on Islamic and Ottoman traditions of consultation. In 1895, he began publishing a bimonthly newspaper, Meşveret, which soon became a locus of the exile Young Turk movement. The newspaper was also smuggled into the empire and circulated among liberal intellectuals there. Ahmet Riza's chief rival was the more radical Prince Sabahettin, who founded a separate Young Turk group and newspaper in Paris. Ahmet Riza opposed the prince's calls for revolution and European intervention in the empire at the 1902 Congress of Ottoman Liberals in Paris. At the Second Young Turk Congress in 1907, Ahmet Riza at first reluctantly endorsed the use of violence to depose the sultan, but later reversed his position.
Ahmet Riza returned to Istanbul after the 1908 revolution and headed the Unionist Party, which was backed by the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) and which opposed Prince Sabahettin's Ottoman Liberal Union Party and Islamist groups. The Unionists were successful in the elections, and Ahmet Riza became president of the Chamber of Deputies. In April 1909, however, leaders of a mass demonstration at the Sultan Ahmet mosque organized by the Society of Islamic Unity called for Ahmet Riza's resignation and for his replacement by a "true Muslim." Two deputies were killed, apparently mistaken for Ahmet Riza, when the crowd entered the Parliament buildings. Ahmet Riza was deposed, and Ismaʿil Kemal was elected the new president of the Chamber in the ensuing reorganization of government.
Ahmet Riza remained loyal to CUP during his years in government. But, in 1919 he founded a new party, the National Unity Party, and allied himself with Sultan Vahidettin against the Kemalists. He spent the years of the Independence War in Paris, then returned to Istanbul, where he was an instructor at the prestigious Dar al-Fonun school until his death.
Riza's contribution to the Young Turk movement went beyond his organizational abilities. As a follower of the French sociologist Auguste Comte, he first formulated the principles that would influence the development of secularist reform in Turkey. For example, the slogan heading his magazine Meşveret, "order and progress," was drawn from French positivist ideas and is probably linked to the simultaneous naming of an Istanbul opposition group, Union and Progress.
Bibliography
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Shaw, Stanford J., and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808 - 1975. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
— ELIZABETH THOMPSON
